target articles.

There continues to be a debate on whether addiction is best understood as a brain disease or a moral condition. This debate, which may influence both the stigma attached to addiction and access to treatment, is often motivated by the question of whether and to what extent we can justly hold addicted individuals responsible for their actions. In fact, there is substantial evidence for a disease mod...

Personhood is a foundational concept in ethics, yet defining criteria have been elusive. In this article we summarize attempts to define personhood in psychological and neurological terms and conclude that none manage to be both specific and non-arbitrary. We propose that this is because the concept does not correspond to any real category of objects in the world. Rather, it is the product of an e...

Money in clinical research creates ethical concerns because of its potential to distort judgments (Thompson 1993). Nowhere has money’s potential to distort judgments been more obvious than in the reaction to the tragic adverse reactions in the trial of TGN1412 – the TeGenero drug tested by Parexel (Associated Press 2006; Caplan 2006; Panja 2006; Waldman 2006; Goodyear 2006). Six partic...